Emergency Conservation Program is approved for implementation in Tama County

June 18, 2013

"Area farmers who experience extreme damage to their land from severe weather events should report the damage to our FSA Office" says Anna Boecker, county executive director for the Tama County FSA Office. This is done by signing the required application, identifying the damaged land on an aerial photograph, and completing a fact sheet.

Sign up started June 13, 2013 and ends Aug. 12, 2013.

Producers with damaged land will need to sign the required forms and have the land inspected prior to starting any work to repair the damage, which will include technical assistance to determine what is needed to rehabilitate the cropland. "Producers not completing the required forms and whose damage was not inspected prior to starting the repairs could be ineligible and cost share could be denied," states Boecker. "This is why contacting our office is so critical."

FSA county committees determine land eligibility based on on-site inspections of damage, taking into account the type and extent of damage. For land to be eligible, the natural disaster must create new conservation problems that, if untreated, would:

Impair or endanger the land

Materially affect the land's productive capacity

Represent unusual damage which, except for wind erosion, is not the type likely to recur frequently in

the same area

Be so costly to repair that federal assistance is or will be required to return the land to productive agricultural use.

Conservation problems existing prior to the applicable disaster are ineligible for ECP assistance.

FSA may provide cost share assistance to agricultural producers when it is too costly to rehabilitate the lands without Federal assistance. ECP program participants receive cost-share assistance of 75 percent of the cost to implement approved emergency conservation practices.

Producers are encouraged to contact the Tama County office at (641)484-2701 for more information or on line at: